The last year has been a very good year for films with diverse gems like Spotlight, High-Rise and The Jungle Book being some of the standouts, however, the emotion I feel most with 2016's films is disappointment. There were a number of films I have had high expectations for but delivered everything from crushing disappointment to mild let-down-ness. I'll start with the biggest disappointment first.
Suicide Squad
I am a big fan of comic book films; with the Nolan Dark Knight trilogy of Batman films acting as the high watermark for me and I was really looking forward to this film. My understanding is there are a number of different versions of Suicide Squad in graphic novels and I haven't read any of these but I have watched an animated version on Amazon after I had heard about the upcoming film. In a nutshell a group of supervillains are forced into working on behalf of the government on extremely dangerous missions. Again, the lineup of who the particular villains are seems to change with each version but the two central members of the squad are usually Harley Quinn and Deadshot. Harley Quinn (played by Margot Robbie in this film version) who was essentially the Joker's girlfriend/accomplice/sidekick, and while I don't like classifying the identity of a female character by their relationship to a male character it is undeniable that this is what Harley Quinn is in the DC universe (in the same way as Robin would first and foremost be described as Batman's sidekick). To give her a little bit more depth Harley was a psychiatrist at Arkham Asylum where she treated the Joker, but the Joker ultimately converted her to his side. The relationship between Joker and Harley Quinn is complicated to an unpleasant degree - is it a portrayal of an abusive relationship? - and to have problems with it doesn't make you some ridiculous politically correct liberal. In the DC universe the Joker often seems indifferent to her fate yet capable of extreme jealousy and in this film it is suggested that to convert Harley he tortured her to break her mind. As to what powers or skills Harley has are limited to being rather good at fighting and in this version she is extremely flexible and agile.
Deadshot (played by Will Smith in this film version) is a less well known figure from the DC universe and I don't know much about his backstory aside from what was in this film, namely that he was an expert marksman and assassin and has a daughter who he loves. The rest of the Suicide Squad are not terribly important and one seemed to exist purely to die moments after being introduced and as it would take a long time to go through each one I'm not going to bother and I think this is a real problem as there were a few characters I didn't care about. The other major character, who was not actually a member of the squad, is the Joker who in this version does seem to care deeply about Harley Quinn. Anyone portraying the Joker in a film has an almost impossible task of matching up to both Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger's performance but I actually thought Jared Leto's portrayal was quite good, it was certainly a different direction. Batman featured only in passing, do not see this film to see Batman.
The real problem with the film is the villain. Part of the reason I hold up the Dark Knight trilogy so highly is that it had really good villains, especially the Joker. The villain in the Suicide Squad is...well I'm still not really sure, one of the squad is a witch and I think it's her brother, who took over a city and made people into black goo zombie monsters. Whoever it was the film completely failed to put across any jeopardy or menace and it succumbed to the curse of comic book blockbusters of CGI scenes of destruction that don't look real. I have no problem with getting behind a group of bad guys, after all, I stayed on Walter White's side in Breaking Bad far longer than most people. Often the bad guys are the most interesting people in a film, look at Darth Vader or Hans Gruber and there is a Dirty Dozen feeling of creating a team of bad people which I liked. No, this film didn't work because it wasn't good enough. So why were my expectations so high? Two brilliant trailers were released for the film which I loved but watching again now it is obvious that the villain is not really in them at all.
Next up was the disappointing War On Everyone, which again, had a couple of excellent trailers. War On Everyone was an action-comedy about a pair of buddy cops. In most buddy cop films you have one "by the book" detective and one "loose cannon", but in this film both cops are loose cannons, so much so that rolling up to work drunk, framing people and just random violence are everyday occurrences for these two. The plot revolved around a heist in which the only person to escape was the getaway driver, with all the money, and our two protagonists go after that money, planning to keep it for themselves naturally. While the film was funny in parts and had some good scenes I was very disappointed, first, the plot, at some point it was decided that two crooked cops going after stolen money for themselves wasn't enough and a second reason to go after the real bad guy was given that made no sense whatsoever. Secondly, there was no real reason to get behind them, as I have said, I am quite happy with anti-heroes but these two were actually quite annoying. I saw the film with my girlfriend, Spooky Reading Girl, who had a long list of problems with the film, which I largely agreed with, and I tried to put up half-hearted arguments.
Why were my expectations so high? Well, the film was written and directed by John Mcdonagh, who previously made the hilarious film The Guard and the funny and moving Calvary, he is also the brother of Martin McDonagh who made In Bruges, which is one of my favourite films, and the brilliant Seven Psychopaths. All of these films share a dark sense of humour which I really enjoy but that just didn't work in this film.
The final two disappointments were Bone Tomahawk and Tale of Tales, both films that I missed at the cinema. Bone Tomahawk is a horror western, a completely new genre to me. The plot is that a coupe of bandits walk through a Native American burial ground, thus incurring the wrath of the Native Americans. One of the bandits was killed at the burial ground but the other escaped and made it to a nearby town but the Native Americans are in pursuit. When the Native Americans kidnap the bandit they also take a sheriff's deputy and a woman who was tending to the bandit's injuries (I don't think she was a qualified doctor, but had medical training). Naturally, the sheriff (Kurt Russell) decided to put together a posse and bring back the kidnapped people. A local Native American warned the group that these weren't like the other Native Americans but that these were cannibal cavemen, vicious, perhaps even supernatural. What followed was an odd story that followed some typical horror and/or western tropes and had a few exceptionally gruesome scenes.
I thought the idea of horror western intriguing (but was concerned from the start about is it okay making a film about a savage group of Native Americans) and really didn't get the original and inventive film I was hoping for.
I had high expectations for Tale of Tales as it had received very positive reviews from critics who I listen to, Mark Kermode, for instance. But not for the first time the good doctor and I disagree - I hold him personally responsible for the debacle of when I saw Berberian Sound Studio on my birthday and that is one of the worst films I've ever seen in a cinema. Tale of Tales is a retelling of a number of common European fairy tales but keeping true to the original, often gruesome, nature of the fairy tales, for example for a queen to have a child her husband must kill a sea monster and for her to eat the heart - which we see in explicit detail. The narrative switched back and forth between these stories and despite some good scenes, such as when the king goes to kill the sea monster, it was quite dull.
Part of the reason of my disappointment with Tales of Tales and Bone Tomahawk is that as I had missed them in the cinema my expectations had been building over time and my expectations were probably too high.
I do not really begrudge the time and money spent watching these films, after all, each of them had some enjoyable qualities. The only way to find new films is to not just go and see the next Coen Brothers film because you know you'll like it. What is really disappointing is that I saw these films over other films that I missed, there have been a lot of films that I wanted to see but didn't such as,-
- Captain Fantastic - The story of an unconventional family starring Viggo Mortensen, one of my favourite actors who makes very interesting choices, i.e. I won't always like them but I never think he just did it for the money.
- Ghostbusters - if I was judging it just from the trailers and the people involved I would have been quite keen on seeing this film, I think Kristen Wiig is really funny and I've not seen any Melissa McCarthy films some of them have looked like films I would like. What made me really want to see it was the absolutely insane response from certain people whose main problem seemed not that a classic film was being remade, but that the main characters were now being played by women, not men. I don't have the energy or patience to get into the absurd argument "are women funny" or "are women as funny as men". Some men are funny. Some women are funny. The torrent of sexist and racist abuse directed towards the cast was appalling and it now felt it wasn't just going to see a film but choosing a side in a cultural war and I instinctively knew I was on the side of Kristen Wiig et al. But I didn't get round to seeing it, hopefully when I finally do see it I'll be able to judge it on it's own merits and not get caught up in the nonsense that has accompanied it so far.
- Doctor Strange - my skeptical and scientific heckles were raised by the vague mysticism mentioned in the trailer but a mindbending comic book film starring Benedict Cumberbatch is surely worth watching.
- Edge of Seventeen - good reviews and a funny trailer starring Hailee Steinfeld (probably best known for her starring role in the Coen Brothers' True Grit) and Woody Harrelson, who I am a big fan of.
- Arrival - Still hoping against hope to see this in the cinema and still can't believe I managed to let it pass my be. I loved Sicario, this director's previous film, and I always want to see intelligent thought-provoking sci-fi, that isn't just giant CGI robots punching each other.
- Welcome To Me - never even saw this advertised at the cinema,a Kristen Wiig comedy about a woman who won the lottery and decided to make her own television show. As the woman is self-funding it she has no need to care about ratings or what producers might think she makes a bizarrely idiosyncratic tv show.
- Kubo And The Two Strings - this looked amazing, an animation about the son of a great warrior who told stories about his father- which he thought he had made up - and entertained the locals, he then has to flee when his father's enemies come looking for him. It looked really funny and exactly like the sort of thing I would like.
- Joy - I'm a huge fan of Jennifer Lawrence and have enjoyed a lot of David O'Russel's previous films (Silver Lining Playbook, American Hustle), the story of a woman who invented a map, but you know, a really, really good mop. I don't think the subject matter of a film is what makes it entertaining - for example, I don't think you need to be interested in formula one to enjoy Senna, so with this film I don't think the fact that mops are quite boring doesn't mean the story around the mop is going to be boring.
- Anthropoid - a World War 2 spy film about a theatre of the war I don't much about with Cillian Murphy? Certainly sounds like the sort of thing I'd like.
- 10 Cloverfield Lane - despite a terrible name the trailer for this film intrigued me, and had the original version of I Think We're Alone Now by Tommy James and The Shondells from 1967 in it.
- The Infiltrator - Bryan Cranston played an undercover DEA agent infiltrating cocaine drug cartel, as a huge fan of Breaking Bad (and a smaller fan of Malcolm in the Middle) I'm eager to see what Bryan Cranston does next. Also having loved the two seasons of Narcos on Netflix this is a subject I want to find out more about.
- The Girl With All The Gifts - a British zombie film that seemed a bit different to the millions of other zombie films out there. I'm a big fan of zombies and zombie-like films (such as 28 Days Later, which technically aren't zombies. I do think people get a bit bogged down in the classification for zombies, after George A Romero never thought of the monsters in his films as zombies, as to him a zombie film was about people put under voodoo curse. I think the legendary filmmaker John Landis said it best, when he paraphrased a Supreme Court Justice's remarks on pornography - I can't define a zombie but I know it when I see it) but I do think that it might be time to leave the genre alone for a little while.
- My Scientology Movie - I'm a big fan of Louis Theroux and find Scientology fascinating, in the way a person might find a deeply sinister organisation fascinating. I recently watched the documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief which was great and is held up as the definitive Scientology documentary as well as listening to the Scientology episodes of the podcast Oh No, It's Ross and Carrie (who sign up to cults, bizarre religions, etc. to see what actually goes on) which I thought were very even handed and gave an insightful look at Scientology. So I was a bit scientologied out when Louis Theroux's film came out.
- Train to Busan - another zombie movie (as I said, I like zombie movies) but this one was from South Korea and was mainly set on a packed commuter train which seemed like a fun premise. In recent years I've tried to work on some of the areas of cinema I've overlooked and while I do watch foreign films certainly compared to British and American films they're in the minority.
All these films I wanted to see but didn't and while I didn't explicitly choose Suicide Squad over any of these I can't help but think I should be able to swap out Suicide Squad for one of these other films. After this year of disappointments I felt very wary about Rogue One : A Star Wars Story. I enjoyed The Force Awakens so I was quietly confident I would like this prequel. I had a slight moment of horror when I realised there was no crawling text setting the film, as there has been in every other Star Wars but ended up absolutely loving the film. I am huge Star Wars fan and am exactly the sort of person who would pick out every flaw, every mistake, but overall the film was a huge success (okay, they did seem to send and receive messages when in hyperspace but I am willing to let that go). Certainly in my opinion compared to the reboot of Star Trek the Star Wars films have been a huge success.
So, while I had a lot of film disappointed me this year, the one that really mattered, the Star Wars, one really came through right at the end of the year.
